The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras

by J. Michael Orenduff

  “See? Not a potter in the bunch.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll be the first one to become famous.”

  “Thanks, Suze, but I don’t think so. Even if pots were art, I just make copies.”

  “But you do like art history.”

  “I do,” I said, “and I admire you for exploring all your intellectual horizons.”

  “I’m not exploring my intellectual horizons, Hubie; I’m trying to meet a good man. To which I should say good luck or fat chance or something.”

  “Well, you won’t meet any in art history; almost all art historians are women, and the men in art history…”

  “I know; they’re all gay.”

  “Well, maybe not all,” I suggested helpfully.

  “All the ones here are, and you’re right, almost all art history students are women.”

  “If you knew that, why did you choose art history?”

  “I know it now, Hubie; I didn’t know it then.”

  I leaned back in my chair and gave her an appraising look. “You know what I think, Susannah? I think you did know it. I think you really are academically inclined, but you like to pretend you’re just in school to meet men.”

  “Now you’re going back to psychology, Hube; let’s get another margarita.”

  I looked down and discovered our glasses had emptied themselves while we were talking.

  “If we have another one,” I asked, “how many will that be?”

  “Four I think.”

  “Isn’t that too many?”

  “You know what you always say, Hubie; a bird can’t fly on one wing.”

  “Neither can a bird fly on three wings,” I opined.

  “Exactly,” she said. “A bird with three wings will be all lopsided and really unable to fly. At least four is an even number.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” I said—and I didn’t.

  3

  The next morning I walked over to the University to visit the Valle del Rio Museum. I walked because I enjoy walking and because parking spots at the University of New Mexico campus are about as common as Nobel Laureates. I didn’t know whether I would eventually try to get the pot, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a look around. I was wrong.

  It was a sunny spring day with a soaring New Mexico sky. Classes were in full swing and people were everywhere, so no one paid any attention to me as I milled around outside, sat on benches, leaned against trees, and thoroughly studied all the windows and doors of the Museum. Finally I went inside. I acted like a typical museum patron, staring at the works on display. Except that I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at walls, floors, ceilings, outlets, conduits, fixtures, and everything else except the display pieces.

  The Mogollon pot was in a side room, still displayed as I remembered it, on top of a plinth, a word even Ogden Nash couldn’t rhyme. Velvet ropes stretched between four stanchions and kept viewers just out of arm’s length from the pot. There was no one else in the room. I gently lifted one of the stanchions and waited. Nothing happened. No alarms sounded, no sirens wailed, no automatic doors slammed shut, no guards rushed in.

  I removed the end of one of the ropes from its stanchion and waited again. Same result. I placed the end of the rope quietly on the floor and walked up to the pot. Nothing happened. Evidently, there were no invisible laser beams to be interrupted. Nor were there any motion detectors. I listened for footsteps and heard none. The guards and the ticket takers were still in the front room. I pulled two paper napkins from my pocket and, draping them over my hands, I lifted the pot up about an inch and carefully sat it back in exactly the same spot. Then I put the napkins in my pocket, stepped back outside the forbidden square and replaced the rope on the stanchion.

  I now knew that I could get the pot off its pedestal with no problem. But what good was that knowledge to me? The windows had steel bars embedded in the walls. The front door was metal-plated. The back door was also metal-plated and had a double cylinder deadbolt lock, meaning you have to use a key to open it from outside and inside. The basement had no entry from outside. It didn’t even have window wells. There were no skylights. And at least two people were always at the front door. Patrons were required to check all parcels, book bags, purses, and briefcases at the front desk before passing through a metal detector which was the only way in or out. Exiting with any sort of package would be impossible unless the entire staff were chloroformed. And even that wouldn’t work because the only security camera I could see was aimed at the front door. The pot was about eighteen inches tall and perhaps fourteen across, so I couldn’t smuggle it out in my pockets, unless of course I broke it into shards which would probably lower its value considerably below twenty-five thousand, not to mention make a lot of noise and attract the guards.

  There was no way for me to get into the building when it was locked at night. There was no way to sneak anything out when it was open during the day. I was stumped. But when I was a math student, many of the theorems I was assigned to prove seemed unproveable at first sight. I discovered that you just have to keep thinking about it, looking at it from different angles, and asking questions that might lead to a new perspective. Quixotic questions like how could you show the theorem can’t be proved? or what would have to be the case if you were to prove it? or how would you change the theorem to make it easier to prove? These seemingly paradoxical questions—which in my mind always contained italicized words—often led me to see a path to the solution that I hadn’t seen by taking the normal and straightforward approach. So rather than conclude that getting the pot out of the Museum was impossible, I decide to seek an ingenious and creative solution.

  It took me forty minutes to walk back to my shop, and I used the time to let my ingenious and creative juices flow. Evidently, the flow was more of a trickle, because when I got back to my shop, I still had no clue how to get the pot out of the Museum.

  4

  I once had a bell mounted on a little arm above the front door of my shop, and it would tinkle—rather merrily I thought—whenever a visitor crossed my threshold.

  My nephew Tristan is determined to bring me into the electronic age, so he replaced my bell with a contraption that shines a laser beam across the door and bongs when it’s interrupted. The beam, not the door; the door is made of three-hundred-year-old piñon and couldn’t be interrupted by anything measuring less than 7.5 on the Richter scale.

  Shortly after I arrived back at the shop and opened for business, the bong let me know the beam had been interrupted. This particular interruption wore a size fifty windowpane suit with panes that were too large and lapels that were too small. He had a pasty complexion and razor cut hair held in place by either the world’s strongest hair spray or shellac. The desert wind had started early that day and the morning’s clear sky was now fuscous with blowing sand. Despite the whipping wind, not a single strand of my visitor’s pale brown hair was out of place. He looked at me and then he looked around the store like he owned the place.

  The suit, haircut, and demeanor said federal agent. Maybe Tristan was right to install the laser. A tinkling bell doesn’t put you on alert like a grating bong.

  Razor cut reached the counter, produced a leather folder, flipped it open to reveal a badge, and then quickly flipped it shut. At least I assumed it was a badge. It could have been a turquoise and silver squash blossom for all the look I got at it.

  “Agent Guvelly, Bureau of Land Management. You Hubert Schuze?”

  “Happily so,” I replied.

  “We’re investigating the disappearance of a Mogollon pot.”

  I stood there stunned. I haven’t even stolen it yet, I thought. I haven’t even decided to steal it. I don’t know how to steal it. How could he be investigating a theft that I haven’t even attempted?

  “We have reason to believe you may know something about it,” he said.

  I just stared at him. This can’t be happening, I thought. Then it came to me. I had been spotted at the Museum, someone had
stolen the pot after I left, and they thought I did it. But I still couldn’t think of anything to say, much less how someone could have done the impossible and gotten the pot out of the Museum.

  “Well?” he asked. I noticed his lips didn’t move when he spoke.

  “Well what?” I said stupidly.

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “I know it was still there when I left,” I said uncertainly.

  He gave me a quizzical look. At least I thought it was quizzical. With his broad face and frozen countenance, it was hard to judge what sort of look he had.

  “When was that?” he asked.

  “When was what?” I answered. Stupidity seemed to be working, so I decided to stick with it for now.

  “When was it that you last saw it?”

  “This morning.”

  “So you admit it,” he said. “Where is it?”

  Admit what? I thought. “It was in the Museum where it’s been ever since I can remember.”

  “The Museum?”

  “Yes, the Museum.”

  “What Museum?” he asked.

  I was tempted to ask ‘Who’s on first,’ but this didn’t seem the time for levity, so I said, “The Valle del Rio Museum at the University.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Schuze.”

  I tried to affect a smile both humorous and innocent, but probably got banal instead.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “What exactly are you asking me about?”

  He moved uncomfortably close to me. “I’m asking about a Mogollon water jug that was stolen from park headquarters in Bandelier.”

  So that was it. He was talking about the other Mogollon water jug.

  Guvelly continued, “Our files say you’ve been stealing pots from Federal land and selling them for many years.”

  “Sometimes asserted; never proved,” I replied.

  “All that means is you haven’t been caught yet.”

  “A less cynical person might say it proves I’m innocent. Isn’t there something in the constitution about that?”

  “You’re a wise-ass, Schuze, but I don’t care about that, because I’m going to nail you on this one.”

  I have already admitted to you that I unearth pots from the soil entrusted to the BLM and sell them to discerning collectors. But I had never at that point stolen anything from inside a building, and the idea of being ‘nailed’ for something I hadn’t done seemed at once grossly unfair and alarmingly possible.

  “Look,” I said earnestly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about a stolen pot, and according to our files, you’re a pot thief.”

  They call us pot thieves. We treasure hunters call them pot cops.

  “I’ve been to Bandelier many times,” I said, “but only as a tourist. I don’t know anything about a missing pot from there.”

  “O.K., play dumb. You already know, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s a large water jug thought to be from the Mogollon. But you won’t be able to sell this one, Schuze, because it’s unique, it’s important, and it’s catalogued. If it shows up anywhere on the face of the earth, we’ll find it and trace it back to you. So play it smart this time and turn it over. If you voluntarily return the pot, maybe we can cut you some slack.” He wrote something on a card and handed it to me. “Think it over and call me. I’m at the Hyatt.”

  He opened the door, and I watched him and his hair move unperturbed into the wind.

  I knew the pot he was talking about. The Mogollon lived in what is now southeastern New Mexico until about a thousand years ago when they mysteriously disappeared. They were one of the three ancient peoples of the region, the other two being the Hohokan and the Anasazi. Except for archaeologists and a few treasure hunters, no one is aware the Hohokan or the Mogollon ever lived. The Anasazi, on the other hand, have somehow achieved celebrity status. If the map of prehistoric Native Americans were on the cover of the New Yorker, the Anasazi would be in Manhattan and the Mogollon in New Jersey.

  First Wilkes asks me to steal the Mogollon water jug from the University and then Guvelly informs me that the only other extant Mogollon water jug is missing from Bandelier. You can probably figure out what my first thought was. Right—that Wilkes stole the Bandelier jug for his client. But why would Guvelly think I stole it? It’s true I was expelled from graduate school for selling pots I found during a summer dig, but that was before it was illegal.

  I think the real reason the University kicked me out was because I showed up the faculty team leading the dig by finding three beautiful specimens all by myself a hundred yards away from the official site they had selected based on their archaeological expertise, a site that turned out to be a dry hole.

  Being booted from college would hardly be a matter of federal concern, and I’ve never been arrested. At least I hadn’t been at that point; I would be a few days later, but not for theft. I had a clean record when Guvelly came calling, and I just couldn’t figure out why he would think I stole a pot from Bandelier.

  I also couldn’t figure out if I should be worried about Guvelly and Wilkes both being at the Hyatt.

  5

  I walked over to Dos Hermanas feeling sheepish about having visited the Museum, so I didn’t say anything about it at first because I knew Susannah would taunt me about being a burglar.

  “I was visited by a pot cop,” I said instead, picking up the drink she had ordered for me.

  As I took my first sip, she replied, “A pot cop? Have you been growing marijuana, Hubert?”

  “Not that sort of pot, Susannah—clay pots, the kind I sell in my shop.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “They have police for those?”

  “I’m afraid so. Agents of the Bureau of Land Management whose job is to enforce things like NAGPRA.”

  “That sounds like medicine for men who can’t…”

  “It’s a law, Susannah. The acronym stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. There’s another one called ARPA, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. They try to keep people from taking things created by Native Americans.”

  “Why bother? Indians sell their stuff right here in Old Town every day.”

  “Not those Indians. Ancient peoples who lived in this area a thousands of years ago.”

  “That’s the stuff you steal, right Hubie?”

  “You know I don’t think of it as stealing, Suze, because the things I dig up don’t belong to anyone,” I said. “But the pot Guvelly was interested in wasn’t dug up, at least not recently. It was stolen from a display case in the park headquarters building at Bandelier.”

  “But it was dug up at some point, right? And some people think all those pots, including the ones that have already been dug up, belong to today’s Indians.”

  “Some people do think that, but their opinion is ridiculous,” I said, waving their opinion away symbolically with the hand that wasn’t grasping my margarita. “A thousand years from now some anthropologist will probably dig up our nonstick pans and treat them as ancient artifacts, and probably most of what they surmise about the people who made them will be wrong. They’ll probably say the coated pans were used only for ceremonial occasions and that their manufacture is a lost art when in fact we will probably discover the coating causes cancer or hives or something and just stop making them.”

  I have formulated over the years a set of anthropological theses that I call Schuze’s Anthropological Premises, or SAP’s, which is also what some people think I am for believing them, but I think they are insightful. SAP number two says that evolution is not over. The first humans were short little hairy creatures who ate raw meat and shat on the ground. But they could talk and that makes them humans. It took about a million-and-a-half years for those first hunter gatherers to evolve into modern humans who now eat raw fish and shit in toilets, and you can call that progress if you want to. The Mogollon didn’t make the evolutionary cut, and we have no idea whether they have an
y descendants. In fact, the concept of a Mogollon people is a white anthropologist’s creation based on a few artifacts. For all we know, there may have been a number of people in that area who were ethnically distinct.

  I never dig on reservations. God knows we left them small enough territories; the least we can do is respect what little land they still own. But artifacts with no direct connection to today’s Indians belong to whoever digs it up, and I explained that to Susannah.

  “I think of my trade as harvesting the riches of the earth,” I told her. “Sort of like mining. Anyone resourceful enough to dig things up ought to be able to keep them.”

  She gave me her mischievous smile. “What about someone resourceful enough to steal them out of a display case at Bandelier?”

  “I think we just established that I mine the earth for its riches. I don’t break into buildings and steal things. I’m not a burglar.”

  She ran her finger around the saltless rim of her glass and gave me another mischievous smile. “You will be if you do what Wilkes wants you to do.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered.

  Susannah asked me to tell her what Guvelly had said, so I recounted the entire conversation.

  “‘Play it smart?’” she asked. “‘Nail you?’ He actually talked like that?”

  “Probably calls himself a G-man, too,” I said.

  “How did he look when he said it?”

  “He stared right at me; his eyes never moved.”

  “Geez, Hubie, you said his lips didn’t move either.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And his skin was chalky white?”

  “I believe I said ‘pasty,’ but right again.”

  “That’s creepy. Maybe he was from a wax museum.”

  I pictured Guvelly in wax; it wasn’t hard to do. Then I asked Susannah about the lecture on Remington.

  “It was awful, Hubie. Guns, spurs, horses, fires, wagons, ropes, lanterns—not a single thing a girl would like.”

  “Most girls like horses,” I pointed out.